Happy Endings Are For Hollywood
by Eliza4892
Summary: Offisland Futurefic. Kate refuses to kill the dream.


"This place always seems more beautiful in the movies. I think it's because of the lighting. This has got to be the only part of Los Angeles without streetlights."

Up until that point she'd been satisfied leaning against the railing, overlooking what was probably a very beautiful lake. In the light. Now it just seemed like a void. This was just one more ugly metaphor staring her in the face. The darkness though, that she liked. Clouds covered the moon and it reminded her of home.

"Nine times out of ten it's the middle of the day in a studio. Plus the camera needs light." She responded, continuing to stare straight ahead. The man who was no stranger, yet was, rested his hands on the cold metal, only a few inches away from her. He smelled of soap and vanilla. She winced at the latter, knowing its origin. "How long has it been since –?"

"What are you doing here Kate?" He interrupted, shocking her back to the here and now, simply with the use of her name. It removed the sense of anonymity, the feeling of safety in the informality.

She sighted. He was always so curious. Couldn't just let things go with the flow. It was human nature taken to an extreme. "They chased me out of San Francisco and I went north. They followed. I doubled back, went south."

As if a reminder she can make out the sound of sirens somewhere far in the distance. By the look on his tired face he doesn't hear them. The thought that they might not even be real never crossed her mind.

"So why are you in a park in the middle of the night on the one night it's actually cold in California?" He said, and until he'd said it she hadn't felt the prickling cold working its way through the thin material of her shirt. He always had to remind her of things she didn't want to think about.

"I thought if I got drunk enough I could work up the courage to see you but I've managed to run out of money between here and the last place I stopped." She didn't remember the name of the small town. It began with an R, she knew that much. She was running from the authorities so much that she was never in the same place for longer than a week. At this point she really was delaying the inevitable. This was the end, they were going to catch her soon. She was much too tired to keep going at this pace. "I wasn't really sure what to do from there."

They both fall into a silence, peppered by their slow, uneven breaths. It's comfortable, it's the island again. Silent and calm, with too many questions and never enough answers. Except there's a couple who's laughter floats toward them and it's not Claire's girlish laugh, or Hurley's almost-mocking one. It's not even Sawyer's sarcastic chuckle and they're both forced back to a time and a place they've never been before but yet always have. The background is the only difference.

She thinks a moment, realizing this is most likely not his normal routine either. "Why are you here?"

He doesn't answer for a while, just stares off, retreating into his mind before finally looking at her. "Sarah's pregnant."

The breath she sucks in almost makes her choke. It still hurt, even though she'd known they'd gotten back together. Claire had told her. "Congratulations." She offered up, the words coming out as flat as the feeling behind them.

"It's not mine." He stated sadly, and she felt both relief and sympathy mix on her face. Before she even knew that she was moving her hand slid over to his, intertwining their fingers. It was a gesture of friendship and compassion. She could lie.

"I'm sorry," she said into the wind. There were a couple of other reasons why those words left her lips but she wasn't about to say them out loud. He just shook his head. He must have seen it coming.

"It's hard to believe it's only taken me three years to mess up what took me 36 years the first time." He said, like he found it amusing. He had that look in his eyes, one she referred to as crazed and she knew then and there that nothing had changed. They were both as screwed up as before and she still wasn't strong enough to put herself back together much less him. His compulsion with fixing things had more to do with his own need to be fixed than anything else.

"The money running out was a sign." She said, thinking aloud. "I should've just left."

"You hung around Claire too much." He told her. She forgot he didn't buy into that stuff. Everything had scientific reasoning for him. It was approach to everything. Things as simple as why the sky was blue to something as complex as love. Love. A chemical reaction that could be stopped. She had yet to find her off button.

Their ways of thinking were different. Ways of doing things. And she couldn't admit things to herself. Things like no matter how messed up everything was it would only get worse if faced with the lethal combination of her and Jack. They'd been her before, they'd tried together. It was a disaster. They only caused each other pain. At least alone they could have the dream. The hope that if they ever made it back together that everything would be alright, all their problems would fix themselves. Only when that dream became reality did that hope shatter. She couldn't let that happen.

So she did it quickly. In one swift movement she'd leaned up and over, capturing his lips with hers, tasting him and absorbing every last feeling she could before breaking away. In that one second that she allowed herself to look at him she almost lost her nerve. He just looked so exhausted, so fractured. But she couldn't stay.

"Goodbye Jack."

She didn't tack on 'I love you'. That made it too hard. She just turned away from him, not allowing herself the one last glance and walked away. She wanted to tell herself that this was it and the never-ending-carousel-of-rotating-knives had finally come to a stop. But she knew that time would never come. They would come together again. There would be the silence and then the catching up and the rush of emotions and then she'd leave. There would never be a them. She refused to risk it all, to kill the dream. No matter if she loved him. After all, it was only a reaction that could be turned off.

And the scene as she left was far from that of a movie.


End file.
